


amor fati

by benelelax



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Episode: s02e22 Beyond Life and Death, Gen, The Black Lodge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:55:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26550094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benelelax/pseuds/benelelax
Summary: The time of trial by the Lodge’s spirits had come and passed, now there was only empty space.The final few minutes of 2x22, from a switched perspective.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	amor fati

**Author's Note:**

> 'amor fati' is a term which means 'love of one's fate.' Frank Herbert refers to it as "the ultimate self-examination." Also this may go without saying, but this fic is pretty sad.

Wakefulness came back to him like a curtain being pulled away from a place that had only been black. His eyes opened only with difficulty, as a pounding in his head was muffling out sensory input. For a brief, crazed moment, he thought of Jean Renault, the last person who had struck him on the head, as he had just been struck. Even as disoriented as he was, the shape of how long ago that had been was broad in his mind. The pounding morphed into an engine-rhythm of bitterness at Renault, whose accusatory haruspication had at last come to full fruition. 

He was on the floor, laying on his left side such that his arm was numb and buzzing protest. His eyes, tired as they were, came to focus on the skirt of a red curtain. Not wanting to attract attention by standing, he rolled onto his back, fought past a stiffness in his neck to survey the room. Chairs. Lamps. No people. The time of trial by the Lodge’s spirits had come and passed, no one was left who cared to spectate the aftermath. It was obvious now how badly he had failed. The only strangeness of the realization was how it had not even occurred to him before what failure would mean. 

_What use am I to anyone now?_ It was a miserable thought. If Annie had gotten away from this place, he had no idea how he would tell one way or the other. He sat up, staring at his own hands, and considered slowly both possibilities. In one, he had apparently affected a trade: Annie’s freedom in exchange for his own. In another, Annie was lost to this place, and he was now, too. But he sensed that there was no escape for him now. Escape had been the trial. He had missed it. He hoped Annie was okay. 

He finally looked up from where he had been staring at his hands, and the pounding adjusted itself to settle in his eyes. Looking across the room, he gasped, and the sound grated loudly in the silence. The red curtains were obscured, and wavered in and out of his sight. Two visions struggled in tension to resolve themselves, neither having the strength to win out and establish fully in his sight. There was a rush of colors, and sense input came back all in a rush: competing sounds and feelings fell around one another in a saturated spiral. In one awareness there were the chevrons and the bloody red; in another Harry and Dr. Hayward looked at him from opposite sides of a bed. 

_Where am I, really?_ The second awareness, where Harry and Dr. Hayward were, had to be false. He was not free, about in the world the way he once had taken for granted. Yet, the Black Lodge reeked of unreality-- the anteroom to his and Laura’s worst nightmares, an abstract cloud-smoke lingering in every free place in his mind. Even now, the smoke expanded, retching ashen fear and misery into his heart. Neither place seemed within his grasp. The room at the Great Northern was reality barred from him, though he could feel his yearning to be there like a body hunger-- a salivation on his tongue, the ragged end of temptation. 

He could _feel_ the steadying hand Harry put on his shoulder, couldn’t miss the disturbed look the Sheriff shot at Dr. Hayward. He didn’t miss it, saw clearly the suspicion apparent on their faces. Harry had never worried for him. He had never had reason to. But the suspicion itself seemed terribly familiar, an echoed reaction from others in the past that Cooper himself couldn’t quite pinpoint to any one instance. A hundred frowns impatient, a thousand eyes doubtful, and his own lips trembling at how alone he was in it all. The immunity of many exposures could not protect him from this loneliness. 

_But Harry is only worried for his friend._ The observation slipped away from him before the truth of it could fully integrate into his thoughts. 

“Ah-!” he cried out in pain when his head struck the mirror. Many things collided in his mind, then. There was the tinged, still air he pulled in and out of his lungs, the smell distinctly unlike the wood-pine of the Great Northern. The feeling of hardwood under his bare feet, though he could clearly see his shoes from where he sat in the red room, eyesight catching them. 

There in the mirror, fear glared and burned the way one might burn staring into the sun. It was coldness, though, that seeped into his blood, stiffened the tendon lines in his shoulders and neck, pushed the chevrons into vertiginous spiraling. In the dual-awareness, there was also the wide-eyed, clench-fisted rawness of new freedom. 

_I did not fail the trial._ The realization was intoxicating and took hold of him with an all-encompassing fire. The discrepancy between failure and triumph was lost to him, and the perfervid newness of the things he felt distracted from doubt. He had struck his head on the mirror with the same impetus he had struck the _thing_ on the head. Pleasing such a trial, and in doing so being free to act made his stomach coil, a bludgeoning ecstasy that couldn’t be felt as adulation without an equal amount of horror. He had chased the _thing,_ and he had _hurt_ it, and had done so to leave the red room! He felt such awful loathing for those square, pale features that he had taken in _everything_ pushing at his borders. He had let BOB in. 

_But there is only me here, not BOB!_ This protest slammed against the mirror and rushed back at him where he sat in the red room. There was no traceable source to these thoughts. If they came from him, or from something else, he could not tell. 

The double awareness grew even more convoluted, then. There was the anxious, unsure privacy of being alone in the red room. This was the sense of impending intrusion, of things lurking behind the curtains and biding time before they came to impart company on him. Then another place -another body- where the intrusion had already happened, where his fingers felt a psychosomatic ache from clawing, holding fast to a single mote of awareness: all that was left in his body that still belonged to him alone. In that same awareness, though, there was also satisfaction. A biting, furious glee that finally something _true_ had been released, that people who obeyed their own whims and worked human nature on the world would finally be made to _suffer_ for it. 

_BOB is not evil,_ he thought. _He is what I need!_

This was the exclamation that shattered the double awareness. In the red room, Cooper cried out a wordless, agonized noise that threatened to echo and persist like Laura’s screaming. His head fell into his hands and his hands felt wetness, tears dripping where he had wept without realizing it. 

And then he wasn’t alone in the red room anymore, because his shame was there with him. Something in him was fetid, rotten, and _wrong_. Something little better than Leland, who had brutalized his own child. The failure of the trial had not been a botched escape, nothing so romantic. He had missed his chance to keep the wrongness inside, where it could not hurt anyone, where it could not be seen by anyone. 

_I am exposed,_ he thought. _Exposed to all who see me, but also to myself._ The exposure was all the more terrible for the scintilla of doubt that had preceded it-- a lifetime littered with tiny moments of self-horror, and of suspecting that deep inside, something of him was secretly ignominious. 

_Did others have the same suspicion?_ Windom Earle had. Could there be many others?

The red curtains shook then, rustling in a preternatural breeze so that they seemed to be nodding their confirmation of the inner question. The message was not lost on him. The insides of himself were lacerated, tender and fleshy-feeling from the fear that had been awoken in him by the dual-awareness. The fear would not leave. Still, years of cultivated attention to appearance worked in him. There were deep, tidal lines that held his personality together in his doubts, fears, and shames. They worked now to crystallize the fear inside him into something less potent-feeling. The crystal became part of his internal-self, a geode building upon itself into a structure that could not be easily undone. 

He sat down in the arm chair. He thought hard of nothing, and there was nothing. 

**Author's Note:**

> I have always wanted to write something for Cooper that takes place between season 2 and 3. I tried to go heavy on visual and sense descriptions because I was inspired to write this when I was re-reading Children of Dune. If you know the book, the scene where Leto undergoes the 'spice agony' is particularly about both the loss of identity and acquiring new identity. Fitting for this context, I think.


End file.
